Page 1 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW A comparative
failure Infrastructure Growth in
India and China: A Comparative Study
edited by Dhandapani Alagiri
Reviewed by David Simmons
HUA HIN,
Thailand - There's a tongue-in-cheek rule of
headline writing on the Asia Times Online newsdesk
that if an article is deathly dull, an editor
shouldn't try to sex it up by writing a headline
that's more interesting than the article, thereby
misleading the reader. [1]
The title of this book, Infrastructure
Growth in India and China, certainly meets our
criterion of matching the content for dullness.
But it's a bit misleading nonetheless, for there
are few useful comparisons therein of China's
versus India's progress. Here's one example:
Roads are just the biggest of
India's public-private infrastructure projects.
The government is also inviting private
investors and contractors to build airports and
ports, water systems and electricity
distribution networks. The idea is to match
China, which is leagues ahead of India.
"Compared with China's infrastructure
spending of 20% of its gross domestic product,"
says Chetan Ahya, an economist at Morgan
Stanley's Mumbai offices, "India spends just 6%.
It needs to increase that to at least 10% to
prime economic growth further." (pp
113-114)
That is the
entirety of a section subheadlined "Chinese
example" in an article promisingly titled "Can
Indian Roads Compete with
Chinese?" It's the only specific
mention of China in the entire article (other than
throwaway lines such as "India needs [to do
such-and-such] if it is going to compete
head-to-head with powers like China" (p 113). And
it's typical of how Indian and Chinese
infrastructure development is compared throughout
the book: very few relevant examples of Chinese
versus Indian projects, and few if any genuine
analyses of what China is doing better than India
and why. Some of the articles, in fact, do not
mention China at all.
What this book really
consists of is a long moan by Indian business
writers about how shockingly bad most
infrastructure in their nation is: the roads are
packed with automobiles, motorbikes and assorted
animals avoiding potholes the size of small
countries, the trains and the tracks they run on
are falling to pieces, and the airports barely
function. About the only thing that works pretty
well is the communication network, a product of
India's world-class software industry.
Well, okay; is there anyone who didn't
already know this before the book was published?
With a couple of notable exceptions such
as the first article, "Why India's Economy Lags
behind China's" by Ramtanu Maitra (and reprinted,
by the way, with permission of Asia Times Online),
there is very little useful analysis of India's
well-known infrastructure problems. Instead, the
reader is lulled to sleep by two-year-old (at
least) reportage cluttered with statistics.
This would perhaps be forgivable if the
book were trying to make a point to non-Indians
thinking of investing in the country, but that
does not seem to be its purpose. Most of the
articles are written by Indians for Indians, and
no effort has been made to edit the book to make
it more comprehensible to non-Indians.
We
should digress here for a moment to note that
Indian English differs markedly from standard
British and, even more so, American English. This
should not be surprising, as India now has the
largest number of English speakers of any country
on Earth – possibly more than in the United States
and the United Kingdom combined. [2] So of course
Indians have their own dialect, and have evolved
their own standards of journalism.
But the
fact remains that very few non-Indians have
bothered to learn Indian English, and most
Americans, Britons, Canadians or Australasians
will therefore find it a challenge to wade through
this book's florid verbosity, strange word orders
and mysterious slang, haphazard usage of "the",
merrily mixed metaphors, and so forth. The tiny
few who might actually be interested in its myriad
charts and outdated statistics will be doubly
flummoxed by bizarre numeric constructions such as
1,94,430 (p 97) and, of course, the infamous
"crore" and "lakh" (keep a calculator handy).
Speaking of statistics, a rare article
that uses them to some good end – to underscore a
point – is the one with the enthralling title
"Private Sector Participation in Transport
Infrastructure Development: A Study of the Port
Sector". Here we learn:
The average ship turnaround time,
which is about six to eight hours for Singapore,
is about six to eight days for Indian ports.
Similarly, the number of containers handled per
ship-hour for Colombo, Bangkok and Singapore is
35, 38 and 69 respectively; for Indian ports it
is only seven to 15 containers per ship-hour.
The existing Indian port infrastructure suffers
problems owing to operational constraints like
breakdown of port equipment and use of obsolete
cargo handling equipment, inadequate facilities
for dredging of berths and channels, inefficient
and non-optimal development of port equipment
and excessive reliance on labor-intensive
methods of bulk handling of cargo. (p
189)
After another half-page of
horrific but terse and well-presented port-related
facts and figures, the article continues:
The consequences of these
shortcomings are severe for the Indian economy.
Indian container cargo is transshipped to
Colombo, Dubai or Singapore, resulting in
additional costs and transit times ... It has
been estimated that the annual incidence of
these various factors such as demurrage charges,
transshipment costs, pre-berthing delays and
vessel turnaround time could be as high as US$1
billion per annum. (p 190)
The
question left unanswered – even unasked, at least
by this book – is, if the ports, and the airports,
and the roads, and the
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Chinese?" It's the only specific
mention of China in the entire article (other than
throwaway lines such as "India needs [to do
such-and-such] if it is going to compete
head-to-head with powers like China" (p 113). And
it's typical of how Indian and Chinese
infrastructure development is compared throughout
the book: very few relevant examples of Chinese
versus Indian projects, and few if any genuine
analyses of what China is doing better than India
and why. Some of the articles, in fact, do not
mention China at all.
